Implicitness, Logical Form and Arguments

In the paper I suggest that a loose notion of logical form can be a useful tool for the understanding or evaluation of everyday language and the explicit and implicit content of communication. Reconciling ordinary language and logic provides formal guidelines for rational communication, giving strength and order to ordinary communication and content to logical schemas. The starting point of the paper is the idea that the bearers of logical form are not natural language sentences, but what we communicate with them, that is, their content in a particular context. On the basis of that idea, I propose that we can ascribe logical proprieties to what is communicated using ordinary language and suggest a continuum between semantic phenomena such as explicatures and pragmatic communicational strategies such as (particularized) conversational implicatures, which challenges the idea that an implicatum is completely separate from what is said. I believe that this continuum can be best explained by the notion of logical form, taken as a propriety of sentences relative to particular interpretations.

Argumentation as a Speech Act: A (Provisional) Balance

This paper investigates whether, and if so, in what way, argumentation can be profitably described in speech-act theoretical terms. I suggest that the two theories of argumentation that are supposed to provide the most elaborate analysis of it in speech-act theoretical terms (namely van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s Pragma-Dialectics and Lilian Bermejo-Luque’s linguistic normative model of argumentation) both suffer from the same two flaws: firstly, their “illocutionary act pluralism” assumption and secondly, a lack of interest in where arguing belongs in the classification of illocutionary acts. I argue that these flaws derive from the authors’ reliance on an intention-based speech-theoretical framework. Finally, I adopt a deontic framework for speech acts in order to propose an alternative way of accounting for argumentation which seems to overcome the two limitations outlined above. According to this framework, argumentation may be conceived as a speech act sequence, characterized by the conventional effects brought about by the communicative moves (as illocutionary acts) of which it is composed.

Arguing about Free Will

I explore some issues in the logics and dialectics of practical modalities connected with the Consequence Argument (CA) considered as the best argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. According to Lewis (1981) in one of the possible senses of (in)ability, the argument is not valid; however, understood in the other of its possible senses, the argument is not sound. This verdict is based on the assessment of the modal version of the argument, where the crucial notion is power necessity (“no choice” operator), while Lewis analyses the version where the central notion is the locution “cannot render false.”Lewis accepts closure of the relevant (in)ability operator under entailment but not closure under implication. His strategy has a seemingly strange corollary: a free predetermined agent is able (in a strong, causal sense) to falsity the conjunction of history and law. I compare a Moorean position with respect to radical skepticism and knowledge closure with ability closure and propose to explain Lewis’s strategy in the framework of his Moorean stance.

On Formalizing Logical Modalities

This paper is in the scope of the philosophy of modal logic; more precisely, it concerns the semantics of modal logic, when the modal elements are interpreted as logical modalities. Most authors have thought that the logic for logical modality—that is, the one to be used to formalize the notion of logical truth (and other related notions)—is to be found among logical systems in which modalities are allowed to be iterated. This has raised the problem of the adequacy, to that formalization purpose, of some modal schemes, such as S4 and S5 . It has been argued that the acceptance of S5 leads to non-normal modal systems, in which the uniform substitution rule fails. The thesis supported in this paper is that such a failure is rather to be attributed to what will be called “Condition of internalization.” If this is correct, there seems to be no normal modal logic system capable of formalizing logical modality, even when S5 is rejected in favor of a weaker system such as S4, as recently proposed by McKeon.

The Intuition behind the Non-Identity Problem

This paper examines a well-known non-identity case of a mother who chooses to conceive a blind child instead of a sighted one. While some people accept the non-identity argument and claim that we should reject the intuition that the mother’s act is morally wrong, others hold onto that intuition and try to find a fault in the non-identity argument. This paper proposes a somewhat middle approach. It is argued that the conclusion of the non-identity argument is not necessarily in conflict with our intuitive response to this case.

The Problem with Impure Infinitism

It is generally believed that pure versions of infinitism face two problems, namely: 1) they are unable to distinguish between potential and actual series of justified reasons because they are defined strictly in terms of relations between beliefs in the series so that every succeeding belief is justified by the belief before it and so on ad infinitum and, 2) they are unable to mark the difference between a set of justified reasons that are connected to truth and one that is not because they are defined strictly in terms of a relation between beliefs in the series of reasons. However, Aikin argues that impure infinitism could surmount these problems without undermining the infinite regress condition because impure infinitism can solve the Modus Ponens Reductio, MPR, argument that threatens pure versions of infinitism. I argue that Aikin does not succeed because his impure infinitism faces some fatal consequences and any attempt to salvage it will undermine the infinite regress of justification

Two Accounts of the Problem of Enhanced Control

According to event-causal libertarianism, an action is free in the sense relevant to moral responsibility when it is caused indeterministically by an agent’s beliefs, desires, intentions, or by their occurrences. This paper attempts to clarify one of the major objections to this theory: the objection that the theory cannot explain the relevance of indeterminism to this kind of freedom (known as free will). Christopher Evan Franklin (2011, 2018) has argued that the problem of explaining the relevance of indeterminism to free will (which he calls “the problem of enhanced control”) arises because it is difficult to see how indeterminism could enhance our abilities, and disappears when we realize that beside the relevant abilities free will requires opportunities. In this paper, I argue that the problem occurs not because of the focus on abilities, but because of the difficulty to explain how indeterminism could contribute to the satisfaction of the sourcehood condition of free will in the framework of event-causal theory of action.

The Priority of Common Sense in Philosophy

The aim of this paper is to explore the issue of priority of common sense in philosophy. It is divided into four parts. The first part discusses examples of common-sense beliefs and indicates their specific nature, especially compared to mere common beliefs. The second part explores in more detail the supposed positive epistemic status of common-sense beliefs and the role they play in delimiting plausible philosophical theories. The third part overviews a few attempts to formulate a legitimate argument, or justification, in favor of the positive epistemic status of common-sense beliefs, none of which, however, appears to be clearly successful. Finally, the fourth part addresses the central issue of priority of common sense. Two different types of priority are introduced, epistemic and methodological, and it is argued that only the latter applies to common-sense beliefs. If so, then common-sense beliefs are not to be conceived as cases of knowledge but as the clearest cases of what we believe is knowledge.

J. S. Mill on Higher Pleasures and Modes of Existence

The passage of Mill’s Utilitarianism that sets out the condition in which one pleasure has a superior quality than another stokes interpretive controversy. According to the Lexical Interpretation, Mill takes one pleasure, P1 , to be of a superior quality than another, P2 , if, and only if, the smallest quantity of P1 is more valuable than any finite quantity of P2 . This paper argues that, while the Lexical Interpretation may be supported with supplementary evidence, the passage itself does not rule out qualitative superiority without lexical dominance, as it only requires P1 to be more valuable than any quantity of P2 that it is possible for someone to experience. Some will object that this concession to opponents of the Lexical Interpretation still renders Mill’s condition for qualitative superiority too demanding to be plausible. However, if Mill’s qualitative rankings apply to higher-order pleasures taken in modes of existence as such rather than to the pleasures of different activities chosen from within these modes, the objection loses much of its force. One upshot is that Mill may have more to contribute to debates in contemporary population axiology than is usually acknowledged.

Are Capabilities Compatible with Political Liberalism? A Third Way

This article explores the relationship between capabilities and political liberalism. There are two views about how they might be compatible: Sen claims capabilities should be seen as a revision of primary goods while Nussbaum argues capabilities should form part of an overlapping consensus. It is argued they are both right—and incorrect. Whereas Sen identifies where compatibility might best be found, it is Nussbaum’s conception of capabilities that is able to overcome Rawls’s objections to Sen’s proposal. This provides a new third way of conceiving how capabilities and political liberalism might address these concerns that is more compelling for how Sen and Nussbaum claim. The two rivals can come together, but not in the way that either of its most well known champions have argued.